Positive outcomes or current circumstances may cause us to feel apathetic to past sin, but when present outcomes and circumstances bring difficulty we may come to regret past decisions that were genuinely good. After several months of prayer and the counsel of mentors, I decided to act on my deep desire to go to seminary right after I finished my undergraduate degree. My first semester was full of doubt and anxiety because it turned out to be an incredibly difficult season of life for me filled with financial, relational, and emotional stressors. I wondered if I had made the right decision, and I was genuinely afraid that I had misunderstood God’s will for my life, that I had made a mistake because it was all so difficult. It would have been easy to run immediately from those difficulties, yet those circumstances propelled my faith and intimacy with God like few other things.
One of the ways in which this third trap manifests is in an attitude that easily discards commitments in the face of adversity and interprets those previous commitments as “mistakes.” I think of people who are ready to abandon their marriages and interpret their covenant promises as mistakes because actually keeping them is difficult and requires more than they are willing to give.
The strength of any commitment is directly tied to the character of the person making it. If my character is determined by the changing winds of my circumstances or emotions, then my commitments will mean little. God’s will for my life however is not flimsy or plagued by the limitations of human sin and fragility. As James 1:16-18 reminds us, “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.”
There is no shifting shadow or moral weakness in God’s character. In times of suffering for doing the right thing we ought to remember Paul’s injunction in Romans 5:3-5 which says “but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Finally, while it is certainly possible to misinterpret or get God’s will wrong for our lives, getting it right is not simply a matter of figuring out what to do, but becoming the kind of people God would have us be.
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